Beside Myself

by Ashley Farmer

A girl drinks river water that gives her good advice but a bad reputation. A young woman’s job at a make-up counter ends in disaster. Car accidents and cornfields cause siblings to disappear while, up above, airplane banners advertise hair care products. Welcome to Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer's debut collection of short stories. These brief, lucid dreams illuminate the moment the familiar becomes strange and that split second before everything changes forever.

Genres: Short Stories, Poetry, Fiction, Anthologies, Fantasy

132 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2014

Reviews

[Barry Paul Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A buffet of incredibly concise but deeply impactful stories. So many of these stories ended with a sentence or even just a word that felt like a punch in the chest.

[Jessica Poli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, compressed little jewels.

[Bob Lopez]

I'm already skeptical of micro-fiction when the stories are cohesive and 'complete', but when they come across as scattered, improv-like nonsense, I'm fully against it. I, in fact, enjoyed some of these entries--the best of them felt like anecdotes/myths from the same small town (for some reason they felt like they were all set at night), but my least favorite of them were word salad, prose-poems:

"I learned to sister. We played water tower. I took the light, it stayed, the mystery, the light letters from Edison with my name on them. We chased a river, we played blue pills, we seemed to flicker the truth, we fused back water. The town got red letters. The light stayed on."

What? I like my fiction mysterious and strange and obscure as much as anything, but some of these vignettes went beyond obfuscation, they were hostile to understanding, and I couldn't connect. Micro-fiction suffers in my retention already because of the sheer number of stories crammed into a book and because their effect is so short term, that by the end of a collection, I have no idea what I've read. This is worsened when I don't like them.

[Chrystal Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beside Myself by Ashley Marie Farmer is a short story collection that, according to Farmer, “illuminate[s] the moment the familiar becomes strange, and that split second before everything changes forever.” In this collection, Farmer displays her ability to turn bizarre events and people into metaphors for painful hardships and enlightened hopes.

Many of the stories bring in family members, especially sisters, and the speakers in these stories seem always to compare themselves to these people. The mood throughout the entire book is very melancholic, and the main focuses are either evolving/growing up or remaining stuck in one place. The setting of the stories varies a lot, but there are a lot of mentions of a town and a river, which makes me think of the country and “simpler lives.” Overall, the stories are based on slow occurrences instead of fast action and dialogue, and Farmer uses the same symbols over and over to create a sense of familiarity for her readers and her characters throughout the book.

Some stories, like one with a forest fire, portray how some people can never escape the “flames” of life, and can only sit in an eternity of suffering and confusion. While some stories, such as one about a woman getting a divorce while also being a gymnastic spotter, is one about moving on learning to take oneself seriously in the face of sheepishness. I cannot possibly choose a favorite story, but one I enjoyed and thought about a lot was “Consider the Blind Fish.” The story, at base level, is about a tour group surveying a blind fish in a cave. When looked at more thoroughly though, the story, in my opinion, is comparing the fish to a person who is “blind.” Not physically, but blind in the sense that they don’t pay any mind to the malicious world around them, and simply let life run its course, and let good things happen to them simply by accident.

No matter how peculiar, all these stories are expertly woven with forthright commentaries on struggles many people can relate to. Just as Farmer says, the book does indeed illuminate the strangeness of life and focuses on many different interpretations of change. Her writing style brings everything full circle, with every story filled with lush and poetic words that I had to mull over multiple times because of how candid they were. This small book of stories hit a tender part of my brain that not many books can reach, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading through all of them.

[Mary Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farmer's short short stories—many of them more prose poem that anything else—are often strange and invariably sticky, so evocative in their imagery and diction as to lodge in the mind, demanding to be reread and pondered. Farmer has a flair for surprising, oddly beautiful turns of phrase. Even when the "meaning" of a slip of flash fiction isn't entirely clear, it's a lovely experience.

Book Riot's 2017 Read Harder Challenge
21. Read a book published by a micropress.

[Carina Stopenski · Rating 2 out of 5]

the language in this was pretty, but i think it was a victim of improper branding. these were not short stories, they were prose poems. maybe one or two could have constituted as micro-fiction, but these were not really narrative at all. a lot of the themes felt repetitive and just vague enough to get away with being construed as really well written, but i struggled to feel like there was any story to this.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very weird little book of mostly flash fiction and very short stories. There's some weird magic going on, and a lot of pieces about loneliness and isolation (at least that's how I read them). It's not my favorite sort of book, but I enjoyed it, and there are some truly breathtaking sentences.

[Brave · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with many other collections of poetry/short stories, some were great and some I didn't care as much for. I don't think flash fiction (which is what I would call probably all but two stories in this) is for me, but Ashley Farmer is an incredible writer. If you decide to pick this up, take your time with it!

[Kirsten]

A lot of imagery and wordplay that I just didn't get; rather than stories these seemed prose poems.  And that's fine, this happens in poetry sometimes; there's a symbolism that doesn't translate into my view. 
To be fair, I spent this week reading the book furiously for 3 minutes in effort to relax, dropping it, and repeating that process an hour later.

[Sarahmarie Specht-Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was a wild combination of delight, unease, and poetry. It felt like a dark, weird dream. Some of the stories went over my head or didn’t really hit, while others made me think “huh, that’s interesting,” and still others used the English language so precisely and sparingly that I took a photo just to remember how Farmer put the words together.

[Sarah Schantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

These little vignettes are visceral and haunting. The beginning and ending stories/prose-poems are exquisite. This is what happens when a writer tends to the syntax; the subtext; and the ghost between.

[Michael Farfel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Should be a central work when teaching flash fiction.

[Risa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn’t the right reader for these “stories”. A few were impactful. Most were too flimsy and/or abstract for me to connect.

[grosbeak]

Tasty morsels of language used in strange ways. Probably I shouldn't have read the second half straight through, but the book was already overdue.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 5 out of 5]

These pieces of micro fiction gave me David Lynch vibes. Poetic, strange and mysterious.

[Leesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are so creative, beautiful & strange. I especially loved "The Light at the End of the Tunnel" & "Coffin Water" & "Pillar of Salt" & "The Women" & "Where Everyone is a Star." Ashley writes stuff like "I pictured myself as a single drop of pink water that would someday merge with other drops the same color. How beautiful, I thought, to become wholer than whole" and "From the tiger's milky sleep, he heard the boy's heart" and "Sometimes I become an orange, peeled form the waist up, round against two palms." She writes these really lush descriptive lines that defy labels. Some feel like prose poems and some feel like vignettes and some feel like short stories. It's a tiny book full of lots of tiny stories that feel bigger than they are and they keep spilling out and spilling out even after you turn the page.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I pulled this tiny (4 ¼ x 5 ½ inches) book out of my mailbox, I was charmed by its size and shape. An itty bitty book with itty bitty essays. So cute. Then I started reading. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m old, dense or not taking the right drugs, but 90 percent of these essays make absolutely no sense to me, even if other reviewers see great insight in them. I just don’t. Sorry. Two stars for cuteness and genius that is buried in these words.

[Lewis Housley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of melancholic prose poetry. Beautiful, lost, and sad. The writings made my heartache and my mind focus. Whatever happened to the promises of youth? Who are these "people" I encounter? What happened to the people in my life, those close connections that I can no longer feel or understand? I feel less alone after reading these writings but still alone regardless. Good stuff.

[Melanie Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review now up at The Next Best Book Blog

[Joshua Bohnsack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn't for me.

[Shay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the segments that didn't do much for me were beautifully written

"The more permanent I become, the less sleep I get"

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

#ReadHarder Challenge task #21: Read a book published by a micropress.

I suppose I can understand how some people would like these stories, but they just weren't for me.